Here is a rough guide to how to improve your Google Page Speed scores on your WordPress sites hosted on Verio VPS. After installing a couple plugins, enabling some appache modules, and updating the htaccess I saw my mobile score of 62 jump up to 80 and my Desktop score jump 6 up to 96.

Page Speed Scores Before:

Page Speed score before changes.

The next step was to get logged into Putty and enable some modules…

I enabled three different modules by removing the proceeding pound sign. To do this… login to putty…. hit su then enter… enter pass… hit enter.. then type vih enter…. this opens up your http.conf file. Type forward slash and the text you want to find in this long file then enter…. make your updates… I enabled: LoadModule headers_module modules/mod_headers.so LoadModule expires_module modules/mod_expires.so LoadModule deflate_module modules/mod_deflate.so then typed :wq enter to save. Then restarted apache.

Next I installed a couple WordPress extensions to take advantage of what the modules I enabled.
1: WP Super Cache – Very fast caching plugin for WordPress.
2:WordPress Gzip Compression – Enables gzip-compression if the visitor’s browser can handle it. This will speed up your WordPress website drastically and reduces bandwidth usage as well. Uses the PHP ob_gzhandler() callback.

Next I added the following to my .htaccess file:

Note: I had to add this “BELOW” my existing re-write entries … if I put it above I ran into issues!